


Better The Devil You Know

by Melodic



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Gen, If Blizzard won't give me D.Va lore i'll write it my damn self
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-04-25 14:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14380884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melodic/pseuds/Melodic
Summary: Hana Song is an athlete, an actress, a soldier, a celebrity, and the perfect candidate for recruitment into a new generation of Overwatch agents. That is, if they can keep her from blowing herself up first.





	1. Chapter 1, in which Hana self-destructs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic will be of indeterminate length but at very least longer than anything else I've ever written. It's canon-compliant when I want it to be and canon-doesn't-exist when I don't. Also everyone is gay but that goes without saying. Thanks for reading!

It is hard to understand the scale of the omnics. Photos abound, in varying levels of quality, of the things rising out of the sea. You look at them and think _wow, that sure is big,_ until you notice the little rectangles sticking up out from the coast, the tallest of which reach up to just below the omnic's towering metal knee. Someone then informs you that those are in fact the skyscrapers of Busan, hundreds of feet tall, and each and every one of them contains several thousand teeny tiny people. Then, maybe, if you're thinking really hard about it, you can start to picture it. They are colossal. Massive. Gargantuan. It takes a preposterous amount of distance before you can even manage a field of vison wide enough to see all of it at once, so when the people in those buildings want to stare up in awe and terror they must be content to focus on one tiny piece. If they were so lucky, and focused on just the right place, they might just catch the sight of several small bullet-shaped objects darting around the robot like flies, annoying it like mosquitos. A MEKA unit composed of a dozen bright little bugs. One gets swatted and is sent crashing into the ocean, the boosters presumably damaged. Another is crushed in its palm with a crunching sound that makes everyone wince. There are always more coming, though, shooting tiny missiles into its lumbering form. If you were really paying attention, you would notice that the most aggressive little thing, who annoyed it the most and evaded it best, was the one painted in bright bubblegum pink.

Hana Song was having the time of her goddamn life.

The relatively warm waters of the East China Sea rollicked a few thousand feet below. They would have been choppy this morning anyway, but every step of the lumbering automaton tended to create its own cavalcade of waves. The pilots weren't thinking about the water, though. They were gripping their joysticks with white knuckles and trying to aim their cannons at the right weak spots, and the frantic screaming from over their coms was deafening. 

"I think it's getting ready to release the rockets--"

"GET IT GET IT GET IT GO GO GO G--"

"Chae? Chae, report in. Please? Guys, Chae is down--"

"EAST FLANK, ACTIVATE DEFENSE MATRIX IN THREE, TWO,”

"Oh god those projectiles are MUCH bigger than last time."

“--ONE, NOW!"

"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK"

"D.Va, what the HELL do you think you're doing?"

D.Va ignored the question, grinning as she deftly wove around one of the Omnic's arms while her teammates distracted it in the front. When a small panel on its side opened to reveal a set of missiles, when most people would have seen only a deadly barrage about to head right for them, she saw her chance. 

Those on land saw the bubblegum pink mech throw itself forward and lodge itself directly within the opening and start to glow. If they squinted, they would notice a very small form had popped out just beforehand. 

Hana Song, in nothing but her flight suit, was falling towards the sea. The odd thing was though, she didn’t seem especially scared.

The glow got brighter.

"Everybody get DOWN!" yelled someone in her ear.

Still falling, her descent rapidly gaining speed as the wind howled in her ears, she pointed a single finger towards her target, and though no one was there to see, it is most assured that she mouthed something along the lines of the word "Bang."

The mech exploded. The rockets the omnic had been just about to release also exploded in a sort of chain reaction, lighting up all along it, blinding and brilliant in its destruction, and since their scientists were certain the thing did not feel pain the ear-splitting screech it let out was probably from something more along the lines of frustration. The damage was too much; it would have to retreat to the ocean below, again. 

How strange that something so small and covered in cute stickers could decimate something so great and terrible, one might think. 

Beneath the light show, a red and white mech zipped by just in time for Hana to grab it. She caught the fins that protruded from the top and as soon as she had a good grip it immediately made a perfect hairpin turn and began heading back towards land. 

"Y'know, D.Va," said the pilot inside, a little tersely, a sharp looking young woman in a scarlet fight suit, "These things are actually incredibly expensive. You're not supposed to blow them up on purpose."

"YEAH, BUT IT WORKED, RIGHT?" Hana said, yelling to be heard above the wind, grinning, laughing because that was the 3rd time this month she’d almost died but she had still won, won every single time, and now they were rushing through the air at god knows how many kilometers per hour while she just tried to hold on and everything tasted like sea salt.

D.Mon couldn't argue with that, and she seemed a little miffed about it. She did not have time to come up with any witty retorts though, because D.Va was climbing around the back of the mech, and in a moment she had shoved herself inside a cockpit that was most definitely not made for two people to inhabit.

"Ow! What are you--"

"I have to get back on twitch!" said Hana, rapidly typing something onto the touch interface while elbowing Yuna in the face, and the mech wobbled a bit as she struggled to maintain the controls well enough to keep them in the air.

Elsewhere, a group of teenagers eagerly gathered around a desktop at a PC bang. A group of Korean military generals stared sternly up at a TV with steepled fingers. A young girl in a rabbit t-shirt, headphones in, was concentrating intently on the screen of her smartphone. Other pilots back at the base, some in flight suits (blue, purple, green, yellow), watched with varied expressions of interest and envy and irritation. All of the screens were blank, and they waited, a little nervously, a few even holding their breath. Finally, the stream blipped back online, and the girl they were waiting for looked back at them with a smile. 

"Hey everyone! Did you catch that? I don't know how long the stream stayed active after I hopped out, but I hope it looked really cool! I'll have to review the footage...anyway, that thing won't be back for a while. D.Va 1, bad guys 0."

" _D.Va, I think we're running out of fuel._ "

" _Shush, I'm live._ Alright guys, that's it for today I think! Thanks so much for tuning in, and remember to follow and tell your friends! Love, D.Va." D.Va made a heart shape with her hands, as per her normal sign off, and just before the screen went blank again D.Va's faithful viewers heard an engine stalling noise, followed by a mere second of both girls screaming as the mech began to plummet.


	2. Interlude, in which Brigitte eats snacks

In a dusty meeting room of what used to be Watchpoint: Gibraltar, four people and one genetically-modified gorilla were watching their own replay of the stream while a few dim lights swung overhead.

"So." said Reinhardt, out of his armor, lightly tapping the table in front of him to the rhythm of his words. "Excellent qualifications and training, and she's made comments supportive of Overwatch in the past. Perfect for recruitment. And--" he added, leaning back in his chair with a small smirk, as the screen behind his head showed the massive, reckless explosion in all its glory, "I like her style."

"She's...quite the character, isn't she?" said Tracer, carefully, then turned to Emily next to her. "Wasn't she in that movie we saw? The disaster one, with Robert Greenways?" 

"I didn't think it was that bad." said Emily.

"No love, it was fine, I meant it was _about_ a--" 

Winston cleared his throat. "She's certainly eminently qualified, and we have former members still working in the Korean government we could use to get in contact, but she's a little....famous. We're still operating illegally, and we might not want to risk that kind of attention. I think we should look at other candidates first." 

"Bah! All your candidates are old men like me, Winston. We can't just rely on people coming out of retirement. We need new blood! The young people! Jack and Ana are gone, and Angela has made her opinion clear." He leaned forward, and looked each of them in the eye. "The old guard isn't coming back to save us." 

There was a moment of silence then, as everyone looked down quietly. 

"Are you sure you don't just want this girl's autograph?" came a voice from the back of the room. Brigitte was eating out of a bag of snacks, notably not at the table. Indeed, she seemed to have positioned herself as far away from everyone else as possible, as if she had just happened by coincidence to decide to hang out in the same conference room they were all using in the middle of a sprawling abandoned military headquarters, and speaking to her involved raising your voice to be heard clearly across a near 30 feet. 

"Brigitte, don't you think you're being a little silly?" asked Reinhardt.

"Yeah! If you're going to help us with the recall effort, you're welcome to--"

"I am _not_ part of Overwatch." Brigitte noted rather decisively. "If you all really want to restart this organization after everything that's happened, that is your choice, but I certainly will not. I am here to make sure _he_ don't do anything stupid, and that is all." she folded her arms with finality. 

"...Right." said Reinhardt, with a grimace, as if he had just been scolded by his mother and not someone 40 years his junior. "You can at least sit at the table." he gestured, making a peace offering. "Emily's not actually in Overwatch, and she sits with us."

"Isn't she?"

Emily sat straight up and recited "I am a civilian non-combatant who is not and never has been willingly affiliated with any military or paramilitary organization and cannot be prosecuted for any such involvement by the International Justice Commission or any other similar entity, and if anyone asks I have been kidnapped." she finished, satisfied with herself, and Tracer gave her a grin and a thumbs up.

"I think Reinhardt is right." Tracer added, a little more serious. "We can't just hope all the old agents will return. We need new heroes. Dr. Zhou was enthusiastic, and Torbjorn's tentatively agreed to give us support, but we're spread too thin. We have to reach out farther if we want to make this happen." 

At this point, the screen with the twitch replay was replaced with a familiar looking logo of the letter A, and Athena's voice rafted in from the intercom. "I must remind you all that we are operating in circumstances of utmost secrecy, and any leak in information to an untrustworthy source could spell the end for all of us."

"We know, Athena." said Winston, sighing and adjusting his glasses. "But if we really want Overwatch back, we're going to have to take a few risks."

"...Very well." she said, as several new windows became visible on her screens. "Making arrangements to invite Specialist-Corporal Hana Song, of the Mobile Ex-Force of the Korean Army, to Overwatch Recall."


	3. Chapter 2, in which Seung-hwa swears a lot

Hana had always been better at being famous. Or, D.Va was. They were undeniably one and the same, but sometimes Yuna found it a useful mental abstraction to make the distinction. Hana Song was a bossy, highly competitive, reckless idiot who snapped her gum too loud and a damn good pilot who overworked herself too much and texted her gifs of cute animals when she was sad and always knew what you wanted for your birthday. D.Va was a cute, sassy, multi-million dollar brand name who was said to have attended parties Hana never went to, who advertised soda Hana didn't actually like and had a line of light, marshmallowy-scented perfume that she did. Not that Yuna paid attention to those things.

There were 18 total MEKA units in the Korean Army, of about five or six people each, and they got sent to fight the omnics a few squads at a time, but everyone went in together if it was a colossal. They all had their own brand to a certain degree. D.Va was undeniably the most popular, though, and if someone who didn't follow these things could name even a single pilot it was her. The adorable, bubbly, iconic pink pikachu of the Korean military. Being in her squad, the other four of them got swept up for the ride, but no one else knew how to leverage fame like D.Va. Except maybe Casino, she guessed, but he mostly just used it to get girls. 

She guessed that was a skill, of a sort. Yuna hated talk shows and had to be continually reminded by their publicist that she needed to update her official social media more often if she didn't want them to hire someone to run it. She'd really only ever wanted to play games.

_"That's fine, Yuna, I think they're going to sell you as the cool, distant big-sister type anyhow." D.Va was in her element, wearing her flight suit and headset and warpaint and an absolutely absurd amount of hairspray, while they waited for the shoot to begin. It was the first big marketing push since they'd been recruited, and they'd only been on a few missions together. They were putting them on a billboard smack in the center of Seoul._

_"Do we really need types?" Kyung-soo looked uncomfortable surrounded by lights and cameras and makeup artists. He'd get used to that, in time._

_"Simple archetypes make things easier! People like categories. That's why you're the smart one, Jae-eun is the cool popular one, and Seung-hwa is the cute one. Just go with it, it'll be fun."_

_"Wait a second, no way am I being goddamn cute one. Why would I be the cute one?"_

_"Probably the babyface." Casino intoned, bored._

_"Fuck you, I don't have a babyface."_

_"You do a little." Offered D.Mon, attempting to soften the blow._

_"Fuck this, this is stupid. I came here to fight the fucking gwishin, not wear fucking foundation. I could be making way more doing tournaments anyway."_

Hana and Yuna had turned Yuna's mech, Beast, into their own personal raft, sitting and shivering on top of it as it floated aimlessly for about two hours before a helicopter came to fish them out of the sea. D.Va took a damp selfie of the both of them looking like drowned rats and it was shared online by no less than 40 members of the National Assembly, in addition to millions of fans.

It was a familiar set of motions by now. Another ghost defeated, another day saved, another day Captain Myung would groan at the cost of having to rebuild an entirely new Rabbit-Model mech from scratch, and Dae-hyun would get re-assigned for the week because there's nothing left to repair when the mech you're supposed to maintain is blown up because someone intentionally removed the safety thresholds on its fusion core. While piloting it. For the 3rd time. The girl was going to get herself killed one of these days. She had saved lives with it, though, and no one could object to that. 

There would be celebrations and interviews and commercials and half-hearted scoldings from their officers, she thought, as the two of them returned to the base. She hoped they could wait a few days. Piloting was taxing, physically and mentally, and she was cold and wet and her limbs ached and she kept seeing the MEKA interface over things when it wasn't really there. Hana was smiling, disheveled and warpaint smudged, but Yuna could tell she was just as exhausted. 

"Thank you for saving me." said Hana. "Sorry I didn't say so earlier. I wouldn't be able to pull stunts like that if I didn't know you had my back."

"Maybe I should let you fall next time, if this is making me complicit in your feats of daring."

"Aww, Yuna, I know you wouldn't do thaaaaat. You like me too much to let me drown, I know it." she laughed. "Lighten up! You should be taking credit for helping pull this off! Ooooh, what if I go on TV and talk about how grateful I am to my dashing, heroic rescuer?" she said, pretending to swoon. 

Yuna felt her face heat up. "I just don't think it's strategically sound to take that kind of risk." she said, suddenly wanting to talk about literally anything else. "We can fight the omnics with the weapons we already have. You're putting yourself in danger."

"We're already in danger, Yuna." she countered, as they touched down on the landing pad back in Busan. "This way is faster, and nobody gets hurt. Trust me." she said, and grinned, and flicked her hair and hopped out to greet the waiting crowd that would congratulate her on the victory. 

_"Don't be an idiot." Jae-eun, with his bleached hair and customized high-collar suit, taller than the rest of them, already looked the part he was to play. "You're getting more out of this than money. Way more than you'll ever get playing 16-Bit Hero."_

_"We're also, uh, saving the country? That's pretty important." piped up Kyung-soo, adjusting his glasses._

_"We can save the country without being paraded around like fucking idiots."_

_D.Va, watching this exchange build up, suddenly with just a hint of anger, exclaimed "Doing this IS saving the country!" and everyone stopped to look at her with a bit of surprise. She paused, seeming to be searching for the right words. "As long as we're up there smiling, the people--everyone--they'll know thing are okay and they don't have to be worried. That we're fighting for them. This is just as important as going on missions and fighting the omnics."_

_"...Even if they aren't?" asked D.Mon._

_"What?"_

_"Even if things aren't actually okay."_

_Hana opened her mouth to respond but before she could someone important looking rushed over to tell them to get into place for the photos and they were all herded into the next room, King nervously, Casino smugly, Overlord with his arms crossed, D.Va giving D.Mon a nervous but trying-to-be-reassuring smile which D.Mon felt obliged to return. There would be no more arguing on the matter, or further protest. This was part and parcel of the job now. Just smile for the cameras, and let the propaganda roll._

_Yuna never asked Hana the question again. Sometimes she really thought she should._


	4. Chapter 3, in which we meet the Captain

"I can't believe--" said Dae-hyun, in mock annoyance, "that you're making me come in on my day off."

Hana rolled her eyes. "It's not your day off. Your original day got cancelled, because there's no mech to work on anymore, and now they want us to look at some ideas for new design modifications. Which my mechanic, in his official capacity, needs to be here for."

"Like you don't know the specs of that thing better than I do at this point? You might as well take over." He sighed dramatically and leaned against a wall and waited. 

The MEKA suits almost seemed small, under the sky-high ceiling of the massive garage where they stood, row after row, in various states of repair and disrepair. A converted hanger from the old aviation brigade, roughly half the building was devoted to parts and pieces of the gwishin that they'd gathered over the years, to study and take apart and reverse engineer so it could be better countered. They dwarfed everything else, stories tall. In the space that remained, pilots and mechanics and strategists were milling around, some busier than others, providing a constant ambient echo of metal machinery and human chatter. They worked and talked and furrowed their brows and maybe even snuck into a corner to play on a handheld here and there, because no matter how much discipline you worked into these gamers they never really stopped being exactly that. 

Overhead, a crane was slowly lowering a mass of scrap metal, which no one particular payed attention to until it was low enough for everyone to notice the twisted, crushed, mangled pile of iron and wires clearly used to be a mech, painted purple, the familiar Exo-Force logo rendered unreadable. Everything seemed to get a little quieter. 

"Ouch." he said, and then immediately felt like that was a tad inappropriate. 

"Kitt3." D.Va said, grimly, and so quiet it was as if she was talking to herself. "Bora Chae, squad 8. Cute, quiet. Really good at platformers and real-time strategy." She didn't take her eyes off the wreck. "Colossal came down on her like a hammer."

"Oh, god."

"She's not dead! Just...a lot of broken stuff. Lucky, really." she attempted a reassuring smile for just a moment before her face darkened again, and then, with her hands in her jacket pockets slowly tightening into fists, "Maybe if I'd been faster we could have--"

"Hana." said Dae-hyun, having had this conversation a thousand times, after every fight and about every casualty, "It happens. There's no way you could have--"

"D.VA!" a voice broke through the crowd, accompanied by the rapid footsteps of someone running towards her, and as if a spell had been broken the whole room resumed usual business.

A moment later a pilot reached her, exhausted and out of breath, who those in the know would recognize as the shining star of squad 3, a celebrated, highly decorated soldier responsible for saving millions of lives who in official circles was usually known as aimbotbabey69. He put a hand against a mech on standby for a moment, to steady himself, and then with a look that can only be described as absolute terror on his face said "Captain Myung wants to see you. Right away." 

Hana looked a Dae-hyun, who shrugged a little helplessly. "Right away?" she asked.

"Like, _now._ " he said. And they both looked at her sympathetically for a moment before she took off, because no one had ever kept the Captain waiting and lived to tell about it. 

\--

Captain Myung was a short, trim woman with a uniform so sharp one would think it could cut glass, with an office so neat one imagines she would be able to tell if you moved something by even a centimeter, and the kind of glare that made grown men suddenly scramble to apologize for something even if seconds before they were absolutely certain they had done nothing wrong. She was the kind of boss whose inferiors could not even fathom the idea of her having a personal life, or that she had not simply appeared in the world fully-formed at 48 wearing something standard-issue, and that was exactly how she liked it. 

Captain Myung was severe and spick-and-span and by-the-book. She figured she had to be, when the people she was assigned to lead were unruly teenagers with livestreams and cereal box endorsement deals. Someone needed to put a military face on it, with a perfect salute and an operation that ran like clockwork, to seem in control and beyond reproach in front of the generals and politicians who had never liked the Exo-Force in the first place. Someone responsible to convince everyone that this whole thing was still a good idea.

It wasn't, of course. It was a terrible idea. They were kids. They were good kids, brave kids, kids who were willing to die for something; the problem was the adults that kept letting them. But nobody else had the skill set, and they couldn't use drones anymore, so this terrible, awful idea was all they had left. She had worked under Jack Morrison, back in the day; she knew quite a lot about terrible ideas and the smart people who went through with them for lack of better options. If unruly teens were really going to be their last line of defense, then the least she could do was try to ensure their mechs were as safe as possible and take the heat from her superiors for their numerous fuck-ups. It helped that heat, as it were, always seemed to quietly dissipate into nothing with only a sharp glance when Captain Myung was involved.

The man in her office was not dissipating into nothing, no matter how she glared at him, though from the look on his face he desperately wished he was. 

"And who," she said, carefully, "did you say you received this transmission from?"

"Athena, sir."

"The AI network?"

"Yes, sir. It was also signed by Dr. Winston."

"Dr. Winston is dead, Mr. Kim, for many, many years now."

"No, I meant his--the gorilla, I mean. Sir. Ma'am." 

"You would consider a gorilla a doctor?"

"He does have a PhD., sir." He was starting to sweat. 

Captain Myung put her hands on her temples and closed her eyes. It had been a very, very long day. It would have been a very long day anyway, even without one of her engineers showing up outside her door without an appointment, insisting it was urgent, and just when she thought there was some terrible disaster involving a fusion cannon or some-such he had the audacity to come into her office and say the word _Overwatch._

They were starting it up again. Illegally. Idiots. She briefly considered asking the very nervous man before her if he really thought it would work. He'd been an agent too, back in the day; that was why they had contacted him. She did not, because he seemed to have a hard time getting his words out as it was, and Captain Myung was not one for philosophizing. 

"Very well." she said. 

There was a pause. He blinked. It did not seem as if he had expected it to be this easy. "You're going to let her join?"

"No." said Captain Myung. "That would be illegal. I will, however, inform Corporal Song of their interest in her. And if, coincidentally, she decides to take some leave and spend a bit of time off the coast of Spain immediately after, that would be left up to her own discretion." she finished curtly, and then waved a hand towards the door. "You are dismissed." 

The man stood up in a hurry and headed for the door and as he reached for the doorknob he stopped, and turned back around, and the Captain raised an eyebrow in the manner of someone who was very unused to people sticking around after she had said the word "dismissed." 

"What about you, sir?"

"Me?"

"The recall. People are getting together again, talking, lots of the old boys and--"

Captain Myung laughed. It was ice cold and absolutely humorless. "I will not be joining you." she said. She had bigger problems. Her problems were, in fact, the size of several skyscrapers stacked on top of each other and crawling out of the sea every month. She did not have the time for trifling ideas like re-joining Overwatch. 

Terrible ideas, she thought. From such smart people. 

\--

Casino - 10:48  
hey guys d.va's dead

Overlord - 10:48  
lol rip  
can i have her stuff

D.Mon - 10:49  
what are you guys talking about

Casino - 10:50  
she's dead keep up  
captain murdered her

Overlord - 10:50  
yeah and ive got dibs on her pc  
will fight you for it if i have to

King - 10:51  
I'm so sorry to hear about her demise. What a travesty, such a bright star shorn and taken from this earth before her time. Truly, only the good die young.  
I won't fight you for the PC if I can have the consoles.

Overlord - 10:51  
poggers

D.Mon - 10:52  
can any of you be serious for like five minutes of your entire lives

Casino - 10:52  
no.

King - 10:53  
Our bitter sense of humor is a hard-earned coping mechanism to the daily horror of imminent death by giant robot, and I shan't have it denied to me.  
Myung probably just yelled at her for doing stupid stunts again. 

Casino - 10:54  
no someone texted me like 10 minutes ago  
she was in her office for like an hour and they haven't heard from her since  
all her media appearances after the end of this week have been cancelled  
she's in like actual trouble this time 

Overlord - 10:55  
o fuck

King - 10:55  
Oh, that's bad. 

D.Mon - 10:55  
great


End file.
